An exercise in vanity

Hello all!! And greetings to my blog?? Yes, I caved and started a blog. I was doing such a terrible job of keeping people up-to-date through email and felt so guilty of filling up everyone’s inbox with my dribble that I figured this might be a better option.

So lots have happened since my last installment (considering my last installment was sometime back in July…). I’ve had Spring Break (my first ever to not focus on training for one sport or another), I’m now over half way through the term, and (maybe the most exciting part) the weather’s getting better!!!!

I’ll try to do a more detailed post about my Spring Break later on but for now I’ll keep it short(er) and sweet(er) and just go over some of the stuff that’s been going on in the lovely city of Wellington lately. I got back from break 3 weeks ago and was thrown right back into school and work. And by that I mean I’ve really not had much to do. School down here hasn’t been much of a challenge (although it’s possible that I just failed an Environmental Policy exam last week…) and my work ethic went into hibernation when I flew over the Pacific. It’s very, very strange to only have academic commitments…and use the term “commitment” so lightly as all my classes translate as Pass/Fail back at Tufts. I don’t have crew in the mornings, club meetings in the evenings, and very few strenuous academic commitments. I’m sure that, if you’re reading this in the basement of a college library, shaking from too much caffeine and too little sleep, you probably hate me. And I’m sure I’ll hate myself too mid-February when midterms roll around and the crew season takes off again and I’m up to my eyeballs in reality (or at least more of a reality than I have down here…). I’ll look back longingly on those times in New Zealand when I could twiddle my thumbs and write a blog on a Sunday night.

However, I’ve decided to use this time wisely and now spend more hours reading novels than I do text books and fulfilling my cultural requirements by developing a robust knowledge of New Zealand wines. So all in all there’s very little for me to complain about down here.

I finish school on October 24 meaning I have 2 whole months of flying solo in the Southern Hemisphere as a homeless (well, almost homeless) vagabond. The plan is to travel the South Island and do a wee detour to Australia so if anyone out there has information or a “must-do” activity/sight then please, oh pretty please, shoot me an email and tell me. I have very little on the agenda right now beyond skydiving/bungee jumping. And here’s a fun fact for you: not only are extreme sports not for the faint hearted, they’re definitely NOT for the penny-wise. A single dive can cost upwards of $300 but I might have to get over the sticker shock and my tremendous fear of heights and go for it anyways. And the bright side of the US economy going into a nose dive last week (hell, who am I kidding? This has the makings of The Great Depression: The Remake) is that the US dollar is now up against the Kiwi. So while my European counterparts starve I can splurge on luxuries like milk and cheese!

Hopefully everyone is doing well back in the US, or the UK, or wherever else you might be reading this from (or not, more likely than not). Lots of love! xoxo